


we might be dead by tomorrow

by vystrx



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Tony Stark Needs a Hug, alt title: tony stark has problems with dying and also existential dread, and just mortality in general, lots of thinking about dying in freak accidents, mentions of Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, seriously someone just give this guy a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 11:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13410303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vystrx/pseuds/vystrx
Summary: nothing is for sure in this life except that at any moment, completely inexplicably, they might all die.





	we might be dead by tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [knucklehead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knucklehead/gifts).



Nothing is for sure in this life except that at any moment, completely inexplicably, they might all die. There’s nothing glamorous or thrilling about it. In fact, if Tony’s being completely, soul-searchingly honest, it’s fucking terrifying. Of course, everyone lives with that distinct possibility looming over their head. He can think of a hundred and one ways any average person’s life might end in a split second, ranging from freak car accident to brain hemorrhage to accidental poisoning via undercooked pufferfish, but this is different. Maybe it was being captured and locked in a cave somewhere in a nameless desert for a month, maybe it was watching what could best be described as death itself pouring out of a goddamn rift in the sky, maybe it was neither, or maybe it was both. Whatever way he ended up here, the fact of the matter remains that Tony’s been face to face with the real thing more times than he can count on one hand, and it never gets any less piss-your-pants horrible. That, and the fact that there’s a target on his back in the shape of a big old ‘A’, big enough to be seen from outer space. His back, and the backs of the only people in the world he trusts with his life, and less figuratively, the place they all live. 

 

Tony thinks about this kind of thing a lot more than he’d like to admit. There’s a fun game he’s got going, where he tries to imagine new ways they could all be taken out at once and sometimes runs them by JARVIS for a probability check. Of course, he almost always gets some sort of sarcastic answer about how he’s not going to get an answer, and he has a sneaking suspicion that it’s because Steve’s been talking to him again about how much Tony’s been drinking lately, but really, it isn’t either of their business, so he enjoys his game by himself most of the time. He tried playing with Natasha, once, but she beat him in two rounds by casually mentioning that if someone set off a nuclear bomb anywhere in the city they’d all be vaporized in seconds, which is statistically  _ way _ more likely than the tower being smashed to bits by some freakishly strong alien for two reasons: one, Tony’s infrastructure is better than that, and two, there are dozens of nuclear devices currently missing and could be quite literally anywhere in the world, including under their feet. 

 

He didn’t sleep for a week after that one. Turns out, it’s a lot harder to build something that can keep a person safe from a nuclear detonation than it is to build a nuclear device, who knew? Of course, the tower is already lined with enough lead to protect them from immediate fallout and there’s a shelter deep beneath the basement where nothing can touch them that’s got enough space for Bruce to be comfortable and enough food and water to last three months assuming none of them kill each other from sheer proximity and cabin fever, but there’s really only so much even the most extensive preparations can do. Steve had been the only one to get him out of his lab eventually, talking to him like he thought it was guilt eating him alive. Tony let him think that, because in all honesty it was easier to just let him believe that he just feels guilty for putting hundreds of pounds of devastating weaponry into the world than to tell him the whole truth, because saying  _ I’m fucking terrified that we’re going to die any second, all of us _ is just a little too real for him. That’s what alcohol is for, anyway. It takes away the edge of that fear and leaves it a bit more palatable, and besides, everyone would rather deal with an alcoholic than an agoraphobe that’s constantly thinking about how everything around him could kill him.

 

He tells himself that the full automation of the kitchen is just a reasonable upgrade, because it’s the twenty-first century and if he has to spend one more second watching Steve fail to understand that putting a metal spoon in a microwave could make the whole damn thing explode and a piece of metal lodged firmly in the throat will kill even a super soldier, he might have an aneurism. It’s definitely not because there are approximately ten thousand different ways to die in freak kitchen-related accidents and he just will  _ not _ stand for that kind of statistical death probability in his home, no sir, no ma’am. Someone catches on to the fact that he’s maybe going a bit over the top, because a few weeks afterwards, they snare him in said kitchen and have a heart to heart about how it’s really  _ okay _ that they still have to do things like cook their own eggs and replace the coffee pot when Thor burns himself and sends the whole thing flying in surprise, which happens more often than one would think. He has to sit there and listen and tell them it’s just because he’s bored and there’s not much better to do, besides, who has time to stand over a stove and sweat anymore when there’s so much important work to be done?

 

What he doesn’t tell them is that he’s almost done designing a completely fail-proof elevator build out of something two atoms away from vibranium that would survive almost any disaster he can possibly imagine. Of course, it’s taking longer than he would’ve hoped because JARVIS keeps refusing to help him run simulations of its impact survival rates to make sure that it’s 100% for the twentieth time that hour and doing calculations like that by hand is a bitch and a half, but oh well. The actual bodies are ready to go when Tony realizes that they’re useless if the entire shaft collapses and buries the passenger amid rubble for days on end without food or water or a way of getting out of the metal deathbox, so he has to redesign them with a crushproof chamber in the bottom capable of holding enough food and water for a month, complete with an air cycling system and oxygen just in case the closed-circuit detection system finds, say, noxious gas in the air after the collapse and needs to sustain itself until it’s breathable again. He’s just about done finishing the schematics when JARVIS announces he needs to do something other than fret over every possible thing that could go wrong during the two minutes spent in an elevator. Tony resists the urge to rattle off all the statistics he’s found over the past week in his two a.m. Google sprees, like the fact that twenty-six people in America die every year in freak elevator-related accidents, and after an hour of nonstop urging, finally goes upstairs for a cup of coffee and at least five minutes of social interaction, per a system requirement someone (he suspects Steve) had convinced JARVIS to set for every forty-eight hours Tony spends alone in the lab. 

 

That’s how he ends up pacing back and forth by the kitchen, listening to the machine hum that’ll spit out a mug full of coffee (perfectly heated so it’s warm enough but not too hot so as to burn) and thinking over his plans, trying desperately to find another problem to fix. Anything that will give him reason to stay away from the rest of the Avengers for a bit longer, because he’s still annoyed at them for forcing him to see a SHIELD psychologist and resultantly being told he’s just paranoid, which is a normal side effect of PTSD,  _ as if _ he’s paranoid. He’d also been told that he’s an alcoholic and that talking to an A.I. program is  _ not _ a suitable replacement for real human interaction, so it’s obvious the crackpot had no idea what he was talking about. His coffee finally emerges, black with just enough sugar to give him enough of a rush until the caffeine kicks in properly, and Tony takes it with a frown etched onto his face, still deep in thought. Aiming to fulfill the second part of his lab-unlocking requirement, he wanders towards the first sound he hears, which happens to be the TV in the other room, tuned to a news station by the sound of it. 

 

“-live from the scene of what’s been reported as a drive-by shooting in Downtown Manhattan, where one victim has been killed and another injured.”

 

He catches the edge of the screen just in time to see a sliver of red-white-and-blue along one corner of the screen, partly obscured by a tarp and the blue-clad bodies of the NYPD. It takes half a second for his sleep-deprived brain to process why the pattern is so familiar, and by the time it clicks, his cup is already smashing into the ground, coffee spilling across the floor. Tony leaves it for one of the bots to clean up, too busy sprinting at full speed for his lab. 

 

“JARVIS, open the door!”

 

He pounds on the glass, not caring how solid it is against his hand, how unforgiving.

 

“I can’t do that, sir, you haven’t-”

 

“I don’t give a damn who I haven’t talked to, open the door!”

 

Distantly, he wonders if he’s only let in because of the panic on his voice. He skids to a stop in front of his workbench, pulling up every possible piece of information he can find on the shooting. No names have been released yet, no pictures or identifying details. There’s nothing but useless chatter over the police scanner, so Tony turns it off and starts searching every possible way to track Steve down that he possibly can - cell data, traffic cameras, the whole nine yards - and comes up empty every time. A horrible feeling of being trapped is starting to close in on him as he tells JARVIS to call Steve’s phone, but the endless ringing over and over again is somehow worse than the silence, so he hangs up before the answering machine picks up. This is the worst possible scenario, the absolute worst thing that could happen. How could he have been so stupid? He’d spent so much time focusing on things that could go wrong inside the tower without even giving thought to the fact that some of the Avengers like to actually  _ leave _ , and he couldn’t even offer them protection from stupid little things like bullets, and now Steve’s dead and this is all his fault. Tony can’t breathe right, his hands are shaking and Steve’s not answering his phone and he can’t find a goddamned trace of him anywhere in New York-

 

“Tony?”

 

He whips around, knocking a stack of half-finished calculations off the table in the process with a sputtered curse. 

 

“Steve-”

 

It was supposed to be an entire sentence, but only the first word makes it out before he shuts himself up and does his best to pull himself together, realizing all at once how crazy he must seem. Steve shuts the door to his lab and walks over to him like one might approach a violent dog, hands out and eyes worried. 

 

“What’s going on?”

 

Tony’s mind is going in circles, trying to piece together the slice of Steve’s shield he saw sticking out from the body-shaped tarp with all the blood and police and caution tape and the fact that Steve is here,  _ standing in front of him _ . He’s half convinced he’s degraded to hallucinating entirely, driven absolutely mad by his own mind. 

 

“I- you- there was a shooting, your shield-”

 

He’s not making any sense. Deep breath. In, out, like the shrink told him, except his lungs don’t want to follow directions and he keeps hiccuping little gasps of air like a goddamn fish left straining in the fisherman’s bucket, drowning in air. Steve looks confused. Then, realization dawns on his face, and then it’s a half-second before Tony’s being wrapped in a hug that envelopes him entirely, solid and real and  _ Steve _ .

 

“I’m here, it’s okay, I’m okay,” he’s saying, whispering it to him like it’ll make a difference. It does, but Tony doesn’t want to tell him that, because that means admitting that he was afraid in the first place, and that’s very unbecoming of the world’s first billionaire real-life superhero. But before he can stop himself, Steve’s doing that  _ thing _ where he’s reaching deep into whatever soul Tony has left and yanking out all the dirty, embarrassing parts and making him dust them off, and within minutes he’s got Tony sitting next to him on the floor of the lab, blabbering about what he’d seen on TV and how he thought Steve was  _ dead, goddammit _ . From there it’s only a merry hop-skip-and-jump on to the elevators and that just scratches the surface of everything he’s been working on every time he has five minutes in which he doesn’t have to be saving the world. Before he knows it, they’ve been sitting there for an hour and he’s telling Steve all about his worst fears and how he’s so fucking terrified to die because as fucked up as his life here might be, the idea of just ceasing to exist is somehow even worse, and then he’s holding back tears. 

 

Without meaning to, he tells Steve everything there is to be told, even all the particularly ugly bits he withheld from the SHIELD doctor about how he sometimes wishes he just ripped the arc reactor out of his chest the first chance he got all the way back in the desert just so he’d never have to feel all of this, and that’s when Steve says something for the first time in hours that strikes him so deeply that Tony actually shuts up for a minute, a whole sixty seconds in which he says absolutely nothing:

 

“Then I wouldn’t have met you.”

 

He wants to ask why that would make him sound so sad, but then he thinks the answer might be because he’s the closest thing Steve has to his father, and he immediately decides against going there, so he just says nothing. Which is incredibly out of character for him, especially considering he’s been talking so long his mouth feels like the goddamned desert he escaped from, but here he is, sitting with his mouth closed so long that Steve feels the need to say something else.

 

“You could’ve told me, you know. Before things got this bad.”

 

Things are that bad? Tony wants to ask just how bad they are, if he’s really as crazy as everyone looks at him like he is. He knows the answer to that one, too, so he doesn’t. Rinse and repeat, he looks at the floor until Steve fills the silence for him yet again:

 

“I care about you, Tony. You can talk to me.”

 

_ I just did _ , he thinks,  _ for longer than I think I’ve ever talked to anybody _ . But he doesn’t tell Steve that, because somehow that’s just a little bit too much. Instead, he just looks up at him, hoping he doesn’t find pity in his eyes, because pity is just about the last possible thing he needs right now. 

 

“Tony,” he starts, not like the other two times but softer in a way that reminds him of Pepper and something else he can’t quite place. He’s about to open his mouth to say something, finally, maybe  _ that’s me _ , but thinks better of it and gets caught up in the way Steve’s looking at him instead, not like an animal in a zoo to be ogled at or Tony Stark (billionaire, playboy, genius) or Iron Man but just Tony,  _ Tony _ like the way he says it like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard. Then Steve is kissing him, soft and careful, and he doesn’t think much about anything anymore. But that’s all it is, just a kiss, and before long Steve is pulling away with a smile on his face.

 

“Let’s get you some rest,” he whispers, and Tony’s agreeing because he never wants this feeling to stop, so close and warm and  _ safe _ in a way he only just barely remembers being able to feel so long ago. They make it out of his lab and all the way to his bed without being intercepted by anyone by some miracle (probably an intervention on JARVIS’s part, but he’s too tired to really care), and then he’s in bed and the lights are off. He expects Steve to leave, to let him tough out the night all on his own like every other night, but he doesn’t. 

 

For the first time in nearly as long as Tony can remember, he thinks about the fact that he, nor the rest of the Avengers, might not wake up in the morning, and decides he’s okay with that. If he’s going to die like this, with Steve’s arms around him and the feeling in the very bottom of his stomach that everything just might be okay, he’s not afraid. 

**Author's Note:**

> if you're wondering whether or not the title was stolen from the song, the answer is yes, absolutely


End file.
